Topic 21: Jobs (Phần 2)

The Trump campaign ran on bringing jobs back to American shores, although mechanization has been the biggest reason for manufacturing jobs’ disappearance. Similar losses have led to populist movements in several other countries. But instead of a pro-job growth future, economists across the board predict further losses as AI, robotics, and other technologies continue to be ushered in. What is up for debate is how quickly this is likely to occur.

Now, an expert at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania is ringing the alarm bells. According to Art Bilger, venture capitalist and board member at the business school, all the developed nations on earth will see job loss rates of up to 47% within the next 25 years, according to a recent Oxford study. “No government is prepared,” The Economist reports. These include blue and white collar jobs. So far, the loss has been restricted to the blue collar variety, particularly in manufacturing.

To combat “structural unemployment” and the terrible blow, it is bound to deal the American people, Bilger has formed a nonprofit called Working Nation, whose mission it is to warn the public and to help make plans to safeguard them from this worrisome trend. Not only is the entire concept of employment about to change in a dramatic fashion, the trend is irreversible. The venture capitalist called on corporations, academia, government, and nonprofits to cooperate in modernizing our workforce.

To be clear, mechanization has always cost us jobs. The mechanical loom, for instance, put weavers out of business. But it also created jobs. Mechanics had to keep the machines going, machinists had to make parts for them, and workers had to attend to them, and so on. A lot of times those in one profession could pivot to another. At the beginning of the 20th century, for instance, automobiles were putting blacksmiths out of business. Who needed horseshoes anymore? But they soon became mechanics. And who was better suited?

Not so with this new trend. Unemployment today is significant in most developed nations and it’s only going to get worse. By 2034, just a few decades, mid-level jobs will be by and large obsolete. So far the benefits have only gone to the ultra-wealthy, the top 1%. This coming technological revolution is set to wipe out what looks to be the entire middle class. Not only will computers be able to perform tasks more cheaply than people, they’ll be more efficient too.

Accountants, doctors, lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, and financial analysts beware: your jobs are not safe. According to The Economist, computers will be able to analyze and compare reams of data to make financial decisions or medical ones. There will be less of a chance of fraud or misdiagnosis, and the process will be more efficient. Not only are these folks in trouble, such a trend is likely to freeze salaries for those who remain employed, while income gaps only increase in size. You can imagine what this will do to politics and social stability.

(Source: https://bigthink.com/)

There’s a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Employees are the driving factor behind customer satisfaction. Employee interactions set the tone for a positive or negative customer experience. When employees aren’t happy at work, their interactions with customers can, and almost always will, suffer. Over the course of time, this can have serious repercussions for a business. The place where this becomes the most critical is any business where employees are directly interacting with customers, such as retail or food service. Historically underpaid and overworked, employees in these jobs are tasked with spending their entire shifts serving customers.

This is where employee experience comes in. If even a fraction of a customer experience budget was spent on employee experience, there would be a huge return on investment. One of the easiest ways to enhance employee experience is to ask for and welcome employees’ feedback. They have great insight into customer needs. After all, they’re the ones who are directly interacting with customers and hearing their criticisms and compliments firsthand. Employees can be your biggest asset when it comes to customer satisfaction.

A large part of employee experience revolves around understanding what employees need and want and gaining insight into their work preferences. Another critical piece of the employee experience is training and development. Employees should be equipped with the skills they need to excel at their jobs and have opportunities to continue to learn and develop. They should be able to check in and touch base with their managers to keep track of their progress and discuss any questions or concerns as they arise.

Showing employees that you value the work they’re doing is one of the easiest ways to boost their motivation. It can be as simple as saying thank you, to publicly acknowledging and celebrating their contributions. It’s not just the younger generations who crave recognition - no one likes to feel like the work they’re doing is going unnoticed.

It’s time to shift the mindset from employees working just to work, to acknowledging that they’re valuable contributors to a company’s success. Employees need to understand how important their role is and how their work fits into the bigger picture. They need to feel like their voices are being heard and they have respect from their managers. Most importantly, they need to be able to come to work and know that the next eight hours won’t be pure torture.

(Source: https://www.forbes.com/)

The fresh data released by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) showed that unemployment rate in the month of October jumped to 8.5 per cent, which is the highest in over three years. A new academic research paper released by the Centre of Sustainable Employment also concluded that there has been a marked decline in total employment in India between 2011-12 and 2017-18, reported The Indian Express.

The research paper by Santosh Mehrotra and Jaiati K Parida stated as, "However, due to sharp increases in enrollment at every level of education over the noughties, it was expected that post -2012 total employment would increase, particularly in the non-farm sectors. But unfortunately, total employment during 2011-12 and 2017-18 declined by 9 million. The research further states that this happened for the first time in India’s history.

It is really ironical noting that Coimbatore Municipal Corporation posted a vacancy for 549 sanitary workers. What followed was that 7000 highly qualified applicants even some of them with engineering and graduate degrees applied for the job. The Corporation witnessed the overwhelming turnout of 7000 candidates. Similarly, few month back, Chennai witnessed an unusual event when around 4600 of youth sent their application for 14 posts like sweepers and sanitary workers. The applicants had professional qualification like B.Tech, M.Tech, Master of Business Administration.

Though the government constantly has been refuting the grim of job data but the facts and figures can’t be avoided any more. Therefore, now the government should take an initiative to overcome the high prevalence of unemployment and figure out the derivers of the job crisis. In this regard, it is worth to mention a book titled ‘Job crisis in India’ written by business journalist Raghavan Jagnnathan. The author in his book pointed out factors and reasons behind this decline of employment. He attributed that the absence of skills required in the highly technical nature of jobs is big factor. Another aspect of this is that in the majority of cases the skills or training acquired by the youths do not match or suit the core demand of the job. So at first the government must step up for reformation, innovation and renovation of the standard of the education in universities and colleges.

(Source: https://www.thehansindia.com/)

How busy is too busy? For some it means having to miss the occasional long lunch; for others, it means missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is not being able to take a “sickie” once a month. Then there is a group of people for whom working every evening and weekend is normal, and frantic is the tempo of their lives. For most senior executives, workloads swing between extremely busy and frenzied. The vice-president of the management consultancy AT Kearney and its head of telecommunications for the Asia-Pacific region, Neil Plumridge, says his work weeks vary from a “manageable” 45 hours to 80 hours, but average 60 hours.

Three warning signs alert Plumridge about his workload: sleep, scheduling and family. He knows he has too much on when he gets less than six hours of sleep for three consecutive nights; when he is constantly having to reschedule appointments; “and the third one is on the family side”, says Plumridge, the father of a three-year-old daughter, and expecting a second child in October. “If I happen to miss a birthday or anniversary, I know things are out of control.” Being “too busy” is highly subjective. But for any individual, the perception of being too busy over a prolonged period can start showing up as stress: disturbed sleep, and declining mental and physical health. National workers’ compensation figures show stress causes the most lost time of any workplace injury. Employees suffering stress are off work an average of 16.6 weeks. The effects of stress are also expensive.

Comcare, the Federal Government insurer, reports that in 2003-04, claims for psychological injury accounted for 7% of claims but almost 27% of claim costs. Experts say the key to dealing with stress is not to focus on relief – a game of golf or a massage – but to reassess workloads. Neil Plumridge says he makes it a priority to work out what has to change; that might mean allocating extra resources to a job, allowing more time or changing expectations. The decision may take several days. He also relies on the advice of colleagues, saying his peers coach each other with business problems. “Just a fresh pair of eyes over an issue can help,” he says.

Executive stress is not confined to big organizations. Vanessa Stoykov has been running her own advertising and public relations business for seven years, specializing in work for financial and professional services firms. Evolution Media has grown so fast that it debuted on the BRW Fast 100 list of fastest-growing small enterprises last year – just after Stoykov had her first child. Stoykov thrives on the mental stimulation of running her own business. “Like everyone, I have the occasional day when I think my head’s going to blow off,” she says. Because of the growth phase the business is in, Stoykov has to concentrate on short-term stress relief – weekends in the mountains, the occasional “mental health” day – rather than delegating more work. She says: “We’re hiring more people, but you need to train them, teach them about the culture and the clients, so it’s actually more work rather than less.”

(Source: www.ielts-mentor.com)

Parents in most cases want the best for their children, and to ensure this, they are pushed to actively engage in their children’s lives, to ensure that they are making the right choices. Some parents, however, go to the extent of wanting to have the upper hand even when it comes to taking major decisions, such as choosing a career.

Local comedian and actor, Michael Sengazi, was obliged by his parents to pursue a career in law, a path he followed when he joined University of Kigali, but deep down he knew this wasn’t his dream career. This is why after graduating he chose to follow his passion —comedy. His parents failed to understand how a qualified lawyer could decide to go for comedy because they didn’t see it as a ‘well-paying job’. He had a challenge of convincing them to bless his journey. “So, I asked them to give me one year to try and see if comedy would work out for me. I worked hard and my parents realised that I could achieve big things, and they gave me the freedom to pursue the career.”

Bienvenue Muragwa, a career consultant at The Southern New Hampshire University based in Rwanda, says that parents are only allowed to guide the child during the career guidance process, but not take the final decision. “Parents are not allowed to choose or take the final decision for their children as the performance of the student is the assessing parameter of the career to be pursued,” he explains.

Shalom Azabe, a graduate in general counselling at Kampala Christian University, says in most African countries, not only Rwanda, children are overly dependent on their parents, yet this shouldn’t be the case. She recommends picking a leaf from westerners who endeavour to learn their children’s interests, something she says aides them in career guidance for the child. “Normally, a child starts to demonstrate a choice in career at 14 years of age. This is when parents need to sit down and make analysis that would help them guide their child in choosing the fitting option to undertake. This is in fact considered as over-protection as parents want to exercise their authority on their kids unwillingly, yet this affects them psychologically, and when the kid later on fails, they encounter a regret of pursuing studies that were not their choice in the first place,” Azabe said.

(Source: https://www.newtimes.co.rw/)

From their inception, most rural neighborhoods in colonial North America included at least one carpenter, joiner, sawyer, and cooper in woodworking; a weaver and a tailor for clothing production; a tanner, currier, and cordwainer (shoemaker) for fabricating leather objects; and a blacksmith for metalwork. Where stone was the local building material, a mason was sure to appear on the list of people who paid taxes. With only an apprentice as an assistant, the rural artisan provided the neighborhood with common goods from furniture to shoes to farm equipment in exchange for cash or for “goods in kind” from the customer’s field, pasture, or dairy. Sometimes artisans transformed material provided by the customer wove cloth of yam spun at the farm from the wool of the family sheep; made chairs or tables from wood cut in the customer’s own woodlot; produced shoes or leather breeches from cow, deer, or sheepskin tanned on the farm.

Like their farming neighbors, rural artisans were part of an economy seen, by one historian, as “an orchestra conducted by nature.” Some tasks could not be done in the winter, others had to be put off during harvest time, and still others waited on raw materials that were only produced seasonally. As the days grew shorter, shop hours kept pace, since few artisans could afford enough artificial light to continue work when the sun went down.

To the best of their ability, colonial artisans tried to keep their shops as efficient as possible and to regularize their schedules and methods of production for the best return on their investment in time, tools, and materials. While it is pleasant to imagine a woodworker, for example, carefully matching lumber, joining a chest together without resort to nails or glue, and applying all thought and energy to carving beautiful designs on the finished piece, the time required was not justified unless the customer was willing to pay extra for the quality - and few in rural areas were. Artisans, therefore, often found it necessary to employ as many shortcuts and economics as possible while still producing satisfactory products.

(http://books.google.com.vn/)

Although experts agree that traditional meetings are essential for making certain decisions and developing strategy, many employees view them as one of the most unnecessary parts of the workday. The result is not only hundreds of billions of wasted dollars, but the worsening of what psychologists call “meeting recovery syndrome”: time spent cooling off and regaining focus after a useless meeting.

It’s isn’t anything novel that workers feel fatigued after a meeting, but only in recent decades have scientists deemed the condition worthy of further investigation. Meeting recovery syndrome (MRS) is most easily understood as a slow replenishment of our limited mental resources. When an employee sits through an ineffective meeting their brain power is essentially being drained away, says Joseph A. Allen, a professor at the University of Utah. If they last too long, fail to engage employees or turn into lectures with little to no personal interactions, meetings will significantly diminish employees’ psychological stamina. Taking time to recover a must, but doing so comes at the expense of productivity.

As humans, when we transition from one task to another – such as from sitting in a meeting to doing normal work – it takes an effortful cognitive switch. We must make a big mental effort to stop the previous task and then expend significant mental energy to move on to the other. Some can bounce back from horrible meetings rather quickly, while others carry their fatigue until the end of the workday. It’s even worse when a worker has several meetings that are separated by only 30 minutes.

While no counter-MRS measures have been tested, Allen says one trick that might work is for employees to identify things or locations that quickly change their mood from negative to positive. As simple as it sounds, finding a personal happy place, going there and then coming straight back to work might be the key to reducing recovery time. Another solution is to ask ourselves if our meetings are even necessary in the first place. If all that’s on the agenda is a quickly catch-up, or some non-urgent information sharing, it may better for managers to send an e-mail to his or her subordinates instead. Most important, however, if for organizations to awaken to the concept of meetings being flexible, says Allen. We have to get rid of the acceptance of meetings as sites of pain, when they should be places of gain.” Allen says.

(Adapted from bbc.com)